PRETTY BROKEN PUNKSNew Narrative Nonfiction: life's too short for lies.2013-10-07T16:37:43Zhttp://www.prettybrokenpunks.com/feed/atom/WordPressm@rtinlutherhttp://www.prettybrokenpunks.comhttp://www.prettybrokenpunks.com/?p=3732013-10-07T16:37:43Z2013-10-07T16:37:43ZI recently took a walk with Jonathan Daniel Pryce, photojournalist author of 100 Beards / 100 Days and Scottish Photographer of the Year Award Winner 2012 in a phot0-interview for GQ + The Gap

]]>0m@rtinlutherhttp://www.prettybrokenpunks.comhttp://www.prettybrokenpunks.com/?p=3642013-07-05T13:07:44Z2013-07-05T13:04:55ZThanks to the incredibly stylish PORT MAGAZINE for a stunning photo essay!

]]>0m@rtinlutherhttp://www.prettybrokenpunks.comhttp://www.prettybrokenpunks.com/?p=3132013-02-26T14:48:28Z2013-02-21T15:46:45ZRetailer Update: Our distribution is getting underway. At the moment PRETTY BROKEN PUNKS is a US import – so stay tuned!

“A superb memoir about coming of age in the bright haze of NYC’s demimonde . . . Belk writes with great candor and intelligence about his time and one cannot help but admire the searching young man who emerges in these pages.” –JUNOT DIAZ
. 3 May 2011, Pulitzer Prize Winner, author of The Brief
. Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao & Drown

“Belk reveals a Beaudelarian sense of the city and a profound and burgeoning poetic power and sensibility. He may not know this–I’m telling him. Pretty? Perhaps. Broken? No more. Poet? Indeed. We will read much more from this writer.”
–LORD GAWAIN DOUGLAS(great-nephew of Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s ‘Bosie’)
6 June 2012, author of Fortuna

PRETTY BROKEN PUNKS: lipstick, leather jeans, a death of New York
by Martin Belk

book – online monologues – stage play – recorded version – Kindle / e-readers
New Narrative Nonfiction – life’s too short for lies™

]]>0m@rtinlutherhttp://www.prettybrokenpunks.comhttp://www.prettybrokenpunks.com/?p=1652013-02-26T15:01:34Z2013-01-12T17:50:10ZWhat’s it all about?

Don’t get me wrong: at its grand finale, our club was just as big a spectacle as the day it opened. On the moist Friday night of April 15th 1994, my friend Blair and I threw our leather MC jackets on stage beneath Misstress Formika’s six-inch heels as she belted a rousing ‘you gotta fight, for your right, to be queer’ to christen the joint. Just four months after Rudolf Giuliani raised his iron fist to be sworn in as Mayor of New York City, SqueezeBox! raised itself on Spring Street ― and would outlast Rudy’s reign in Manhattan.

Every Friday night for a decade the crowds came, and came, and kept coming. They converged for a rock scene I took for granted as the only place in the world to be. Black outfits at midnight, guitars screeching til’ dawn, glitter in your breakfast cereal. Torrid affairs before, during, and after. Those of us who worked there lived it, created it, and made love to it. Counter-culture became our career. This was good for me, most of the time – I was used to the back of the bus.

As a young twenty-something, if I’d not been running on the go―out―booze― get―laid―booze―recover hamster wheel, I could have turned Squeezebox! into a true empire – like Ian Shrager did with his loot from Studio 54. There was even talk of SqueezeBox! Records – we certainly had enough bands to sign. There were side gigs at colleges in New Jersey and Vermont. Private parties in L. A. and Tokyo. Since the big Debbie Harry internet show in January ’96, she and Chris got back onstage, reunited Blondie, and their new single Maria took over the international airwaves. John Cameron Mitchell blew the roof off with Hedwig. Patrick had Psychotica so sewn up, Marilyn Manson copied everything he did. It was all a glittering, delicious mess. I was a mess. But maybe, that’s exactly how the twentieth century was supposed to end.

By mid-‘97 Clinton’s DNA was hardening on Monica’s blue dress, and the Republicans would try for years to beat him from office. On the streets, America followed the vibe. We either blew or beat each other. Over time, the cocaine, drug vibe, infighting and troubles with other underground clubs began to wear me out. People seemed to be shifting from going out to be fabulous ― like we did in the Big Apple to going out to get fucked-up ― like they did in suburbia. As homogenization trickled down, a lot of folks forgot they were living in the center of the cultural universe.

Most of the so-called ‘gay’ community loathed SqueezeBox! from the start, most likely because we were only queers. Just queers. None of us went to a gym, owned lycra, or had any inclination to ‘assimilate’. Local magazines wouldn’t run our ads. Other so-called alternative clubs made it nearly impossible for us to promote. Nobody played fair – not since the old East-Village-Pyramid-Black-Lips-DeeLite-Blackbox-Channel-69-Boybar-Wigstock- at- Thompkins-Square-Park days. Not since the fame bugs began to bite.

Contributing to the atmosphere of beige, Giuliani’s quality of life troops were hemorrhaging throughout the city. They’d harassed Coney Island High almost out of business. Some chick from Boston stood up at a community board meeting and whined because she couldn’t sleep in her newly renovated apartment located just above the Coney dance floor – which had been there twenty years. A bunch of yuppies and blue-hairs formed a group and named it ‘Save Avenue A Association’ – although Avenue A didn’t need saving unless you were a real estate developer. A really fun night during the week popped up at a place called Cake on Avenue B – and, of course, the quality of lifers set their sights square on it. NO DANCING signs popped up all over the city. Giuliani’s cronies found a 79 year-old cabaret law concocted to discriminate against Harlem jazz clubs in the Twenties’, and were now using it to discriminate against Manhattan queers, trannies, hip-hoppers and ethnic parties in the boroughs. The city Fire Marshals were taken from protecting people against fires and put to harassing clubs with phony inspections at 2AM. Giuliani took the fireworks away from the Chinese New Year and sanitized Times Square so it would be just like home for all the squeaky tourists who apparently ached for more Disney in their lives.

To me it looked like every city agency was to be stacked with henchmen, and Giuliani’s culture war didn’t stop with nightlife or entertainment. He was forcing community libraries to close; museums to cut back hours. All over town, historic landmarks like the Palladium Theatre were falling to the wrecking ball. NYU was allowed to run rampant through the East Village – buying up every piece of property it could get its dirty purple hands on. Thousands upon thousands of arrogant, binge- drinking, yuppie adolescents were being herded over the rivers and into our woods to enroll for thirty-grand a year at NYU ― a university originally founded to educate poor inner city kids. Mommy and Daddy back in Cleveland, Fort Wayne and Nashville took out second mortgages and sent junior to New York City so he could pretend to be trendy and complain about things.

Winks, nods and blind oversight camouflaged the biggest case of housing fraud in city history. Rent regulations and housing department codes were ignored; inspectors paid off.Had to have been. How else could landlords turn seven-hundred- a-month tenement shit-holes into fifteen-hundred-a-month ‘Renovated Sunny Apartments’ with a cheap coat of paint and forged paperwork?

My hunch was that Giuliani did it for spite first, profit second. He acted like a spoiled, overgrown teenager who probably never got picked for the baseball team, probably grew up with Mommy as his only friend and probably never got laid until he was a sophomore in college―and even then had to pay for it. Now, the rest of us were paying for the mercy fuck he never received. Rat. Funny thing was, if he’d lowered he’d have calmed down for a minute or ten, he might have discovered real friendship in the very misfits he sought to destroy.

For similar reasons, I resented other club ‘rainbow’ promoters who used the same kind spin to crown themselves the new Kings and Queens of nightlife. Too many folks like my friend Haoui, who knew the real score, were gone. Because of AIDS, the credit for almost everything noteworthy on the downtown scene since Studio 54 was up for grabs ― and the bottom-feeders began grabbing like Rudolf, who grabbed the credit for the drop in crime. ‘He cleaned up New York…’ said the news media and salesmen from Kansas City. Bullshit. Crime dropped everywhere because Clinton had balanced the budget and people had jobs to go to. My take on all this: Giuliani cleaned up for his pals, petty club promoters pocketed the proceeds of mediocre nightlife, and the whole fucking thing gave me a migraine.

So what’s a boy to do? Go out, booze, get laid, recover. Repeat. Until he somehow fights a hole in the side of his paper bag. And aside from any criticism that the politically-correct naysayers could hurl, at least me and mine were at the pinnacle of our game. Collectively we were prettier, smarter, uglier, hornier, and more glamorous than any other group in the whole tired, rotten city. We didn’t need to lip synch – we could sing. We didn’t need to search for stars, they came to SqueezeBox! on their own – through the same door as everyone else. Simply by existing ― boys in bikinis dancing next to the Steven Spielbergs of the world; trannies with new chests dancing with the naked Drew Barrymores of the world; homeless kids chatting over martinis with the Sandra Bernhards of the world; East Village drag queens like Misstress Formika, Lily of the Valley and Sherry Vine were singing duets with the Deborah Harrys and Marc Almonds of the world; Michael Schmidt was creating fashion with the JFK Jrs of the world ― for a brief moment on the grand scale of life, we were the world – and many would go on to put a chink in the bourgeoisie armor well into the 21st Century.

Me? I’d managed to climb from the foothills of North Carolina upstage to the hottest NYC scene since Max’s Kansas City. In my teen-hood Debbie and folks like Freddie Mercury came through my hi-fi stereo console with stuff like dreamin’ is free and don’t stop me now. And I believed every word. I still do ― but I’ve learned beliefs come with a price. For now, in the familiar words of Sylvester, ‘let’s party a little bit…’

]]>0m@rtinlutherhttp://www.prettybrokenpunks.comhttp://www.prettybrokenpunks.com/?p=1982013-02-21T11:41:07Z2013-01-11T17:14:16ZFrom Pretty Broken Punks: “The outside of Don’s was like a rusty, overpainted beer-joint-looking place your mother would never have allowed you to go for a pee in: ‘Let’s keep looking’ ‘But Mo-om, I ha-ve to go-oooo!’ The front glass door of the club creaked and pivoted on and off its hinges, which had probably been there since Don Hill’s was Munson’s Diner. An aluminum-cast 60s door frame held a thick piece of storefront glass littered with band stickers, ASCAP stickers and marker graffiti. The place looked different in the daytime than the palace of kitsch it became at night. Somehow, the filth seemed intentional.”

I think one of the things that made this place unique was its ‘diner + music’ heritage. So many other clubs were just these concrete-wall joints – nothing special at all. And I didn’t much like the inside of CBGB’s and places like that – just a super dive – good for punk I guess. Yet, at Don’s you never forgot you were in what was once a diner. The menu press boards were even left in their place. Kinda’ like a party for one in your living room – big enough to get wild and let loose, yet also had a home-y, grounding effect. It was confortable, no matter how jam-packed it got. I like to be comfortable in a club.

It’s also wild to read in this NY Post piece, that “Friday nights from 11 on, they’ve been peeling them off the rafters…” Good Karma for what would become the night for Squeezebox!

Now that clubs are all corporate megastructures, I don’t think we’ll be seeing the charm of a Don Hill’s quite as often…

]]>0m@rtinlutherhttp://www.prettybrokenpunks.comhttp://www.prettybrokenpunks.com/?p=1862013-02-21T11:41:14Z2013-01-11T14:09:58ZFrom Pretty Broken Punks on Live @nd InConcert: “Optimism was in the air. We got a team of companies together, and put together one randy-dandy network of computers and engineers for one show, the likes of which the world had never seen. We gave the event a name: Live @nd InConcert. got Schmidt, who got Debbie and Don over to the crappy little internet company. She signed on to do the show. Then Schmidt got the Lunachicks and Joan Jett. Of course, Patrick was ready with Psychotica before we even got the ink dry on the proposals — which were easy, no money, just cool.

I was beside myself. I literally thought we were going to change the world and make our little corner of the society a global reality. I believed that people — you, me, us kind of people — could, for once, have their own way of getting out. Fuck the big conglomerates. Fuck the boardrooms full of record execs who sit in their fat chairs with their fat desks covered in pictures of their spoiled fat kids. Most of all fuck MTV and its faux pop culture — in my opinion all we were getting from them was a new and improved blackface Al Jolson show. Sad. Plenty of black, white and purple musicians, poets and writers were out there who actually
had talent. I wanted to cut some of the middlemen and actually reach people.

Sun Microsystems, Real Audio and companies from DC to LA signed up — refreshingly professional in the face of the ‘cons’ — and on January 6th, 1996 we shook, or more like, precociously pissed off, the online entertainment world. This was what I called fun. And on the night, one hour before, it didn’t work. Well, the computers worked. The people manning their stations in Washington worked. The network seemed to work. The microwave dish connecting the club to the office — the only link to put it out on the net — wasn’t working. I held the show, and decided if we’d waited for Green Day ‘til 5AM, The New York Times, CNN and Washington Post could wait too. The club was packed to the rafters, everyone a bit calmer than usual, checking out all the equipment, watching the geeks run around. The show had sold out in a matter of days. We all had press badges and walkie talkies, like a real gig. It only took about a few minutes and a few trips of me running back to the offices on Hudson Street and back down to the club to figure out and correct an encoding error on the main distribution computer. God bless the geeks — it’s a love hate thing, like all good affairs.”

]]>1m@rtinlutherhttp://www.prettybrokenpunks.comhttp://www.prettybrokenpunks.com/?p=1832013-01-23T12:28:00Z2013-01-11T14:01:47ZFrom Pretty Broken Punks,Squeezebox! at gunpoint: “Schisk-schisk. Gary and I turned around and stared up past the sights and the shiny barrel of a shotgun. I don’t know what is supposed to go through your mind at gunpoint. This is it? No music? No shrill sound of an orchestra? No. It’s how you know the shit is really happening.”

Yes, I’ve had a gun shoved in my face at Squeezebox!, by an insane, high as a loon freak (actually son of a high ranking NYPD official) because Tommy wouldn’t serve him a drink after closing.

imho: get in your kids’ business; lock up the guns; take the TVs out of their rooms; throw the mobile phones in the nearest lake; reclaim some of this…

In response to the Newtown massacre — £1 from every sale through the holidays goes to GUN CONTROL in the US. THEY WERE CHILDREN FOR CHRISSAKES.

“A superb memoir about coming of age in the bright haze of NYC’s demimonde . . . Belk writes with great candor and intelligence about his time and one cannot help but admire the searching young man who emerges in these pages.” –JUNOT DIAZ
. 3 May 2011, Pulitzer Prize Winner, author of The Brief
. Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao & Drown

“Belk reveals a Beaudelarian sense of the city and a profound and burgeoning poetic power and sensibility. He may not know this–I’m telling him. Pretty? Perhaps. Broken? No more. Poet? Indeed. We will read much more from this writer.”
–LORD GAWAIN DOUGLAS(great-nephew of Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s ‘Bosie’)
6 June 2012, author of Fortuna

PRETTY BROKEN PUNKS: lipstick, leather jeans, a death of New York
by Martin Belk

book – online monologues – stage play – recorded version – Kindle / e-readers
New Narrative Nonfiction – life’s too short for lies™

What’s it all about?

]]>0m@rtinlutherhttp://www.prettybrokenpunks.comhttp://www.prettybrokenpunks.com/?p=1882013-02-21T11:41:21Z2012-12-31T23:59:12ZFrom Pretty Broken Punks: “New Year’s Eve. Goodbye 1994. The second Debbie Harry show. SqueezeBox! had opened on the cool Friday night of April 15th — the day the US shot down its own helicopters over Iraq. Four months later, Rudolph Giuliani raised his iron fist to be sworn in as Mayor of New York City. Little did we realize that our ‘black outfits at midnight, guitars screeching ‘til dawn, and the glitter in our breakfast cereal’ was soon to be at the center of Rudy’s war on culture. But that was OK, second-class counter-culture became my career. In America, the back of the bus suited me just fine. ”

Ah! New Year’s Eve… I’ve always been perplexed by it. All the excitement, all the build up to…a clock ticking midnight. Nothing remotely spiritual about it. Time after time I’ve expected to be transformed, only to be left holding the same bag from one year to the next.

My dear friend from the Squeezebox! band Barb Morrison and I agreed, yet again: ‘If ya’ ain’t raking in the cash, stay at home!’

We did the 2-3 New Year’s eves at Squeezebox! and yes, they were lucrative…who were we to deny the general public their chance to throw money at us?

“A superb memoir about coming of age in the bright haze of NYC’s demimonde . . . Belk writes with great candor and intelligence about his time and one cannot help but admire the searching young man who emerges in these pages.” –JUNOT DIAZ
. 3 May 2011, Pulitzer Prize Winner, author of The Brief
. Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao & Drown

“Belk reveals a Beaudelarian sense of the city and a profound and burgeoning poetic power and sensibility. He may not know this–I’m telling him. Pretty? Perhaps. Broken? No more. Poet? Indeed. We will read much more from this writer.”
–LORD GAWAIN DOUGLAS(great-nephew of Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s ‘Bosie’)
6 June 2012, author of Fortuna

PRETTY BROKEN PUNKS: lipstick, leather jeans, a death of New York
by Martin Belk

book – online monologues – stage play – recorded version – Kindle / e-readers
New Narrative Nonfiction – life’s too short for lies™

What’s it all about?

Don’t get me wrong: at its grand finale, our club was just as big a spectacle as the day it opened. On the moist Friday night of April 15th 1994, my friend Blair and I threw our leather MC jackets on stage beneath Misstress Formika’s six-inch heels as she belted a rousing ‘you gotta fight, for your right, to be queer’ to christen the joint. Just four months after Rudolf Giuliani raised his iron fist to be sworn in as Mayor of New York City, SqueezeBox! raised itself on Spring Street ― and would outlast Rudy’s reign in Manhattan.

Every Friday night for a decade the crowds came, and came, and kept coming. They converged for a rock scene I took for granted as the only place in the world to be. Black outfits at midnight, guitars screeching til’ dawn, glitter in your breakfast cereal. Torrid affairs before, during, and after. Those of us who worked there lived it, created it, and made love to it. Counter-culture became our career. This was good for me, most of the time – I was used to the back of the bus.

As a young twenty-something, if I’d not been running on the go―out―booze― get―laid―booze―recover hamster wheel, I could have turned Squeezebox! into a true empire – like Ian Shrager did with his loot from Studio 54. There was even talk of SqueezeBox! Records – we certainly had enough bands to sign. There were side gigs at colleges in New Jersey and Vermont. Private parties in L. A. and Tokyo. Since the big Debbie Harry internet show in January ’96, she and Chris got back onstage, reunited Blondie, and their new single Maria took over the international airwaves. John Cameron Mitchell blew the roof off with Hedwig. Patrick had Psychotica so sewn up, Marilyn Manson copied everything he did. It was all a glittering, delicious mess. I was a mess. But maybe, that’s exactly how the twentieth century was supposed to end.

By mid-‘97 Clinton’s DNA was hardening on Monica’s blue dress, and the Republicans would try for years to beat him from office. On the streets, America followed the vibe. We either blew or beat each other. Over time, the cocaine, drug vibe, infighting and troubles with other underground clubs began to wear me out. People seemed to be shifting from going out to be fabulous ― like we did in the Big Apple to going out to get fucked-up ― like they did in suburbia. As homogenization trickled down, a lot of folks forgot they were living in the center of the cultural universe.

Most of the so-called ‘gay’ community loathed SqueezeBox! from the start, most likely because we were only queers. Just queers. None of us went to a gym, owned lycra, or had any inclination to ‘assimilate’. Local magazines wouldn’t run our ads. Other so-called alternative clubs made it nearly impossible for us to promote. Nobody played fair – not since the old East-Village-Pyramid-Black-Lips-DeeLite-Blackbox-Channel-69-Boybar-Wigstock- at- Thompkins-Square-Park days. Not since the fame bugs began to bite.

Contributing to the atmosphere of beige, Giuliani’s quality of life troops were hemorrhaging throughout the city. They’d harassed Coney Island High almost out of business. Some chick from Boston stood up at a community board meeting and whined because she couldn’t sleep in her newly renovated apartment located just above the Coney dance floor – which had been there twenty years. A bunch of yuppies and blue-hairs formed a group and named it ‘Save Avenue A Association’ – although Avenue A didn’t need saving unless you were a real estate developer. A really fun night during the week popped up at a place called Cake on Avenue B – and, of course, the quality of lifers set their sights square on it. NO DANCING signs popped up all over the city. Giuliani’s cronies found a 79 year-old cabaret law concocted to discriminate against Harlem jazz clubs in the Twenties’, and were now using it to discriminate against Manhattan queers, trannies, hip-hoppers and ethnic parties in the boroughs. The city Fire Marshals were taken from protecting people against fires and put to harassing clubs with phony inspections at 2AM. Giuliani took the fireworks away from the Chinese New Year and sanitized Times Square so it would be just like home for all the squeaky tourists who apparently ached for more Disney in their lives.

To me it looked like every city agency was to be stacked with henchmen, and Giuliani’s culture war didn’t stop with nightlife or entertainment. He was forcing community libraries to close; museums to cut back hours. All over town, historic landmarks like the Palladium Theatre were falling to the wrecking ball. NYU was allowed to run rampant through the East Village – buying up every piece of property it could get its dirty purple hands on. Thousands upon thousands of arrogant, binge- drinking, yuppie adolescents were being herded over the rivers and into our woods to enroll for thirty-grand a year at NYU ― a university originally founded to educate poor inner city kids. Mommy and Daddy back in Cleveland, Fort Wayne and Nashville took out second mortgages and sent junior to New York City so he could pretend to be trendy and complain about things.

Winks, nods and blind oversight camouflaged the biggest case of housing fraud in city history. Rent regulations and housing department codes were ignored; inspectors paid off.Had to have been. How else could landlords turn seven-hundred- a-month tenement shit-holes into fifteen-hundred-a-month ‘Renovated Sunny Apartments’ with a cheap coat of paint and forged paperwork?

My hunch was that Giuliani did it for spite first, profit second. He acted like a spoiled, overgrown teenager who probably never got picked for the baseball team, probably grew up with Mommy as his only friend and probably never got laid until he was a sophomore in college―and even then had to pay for it. Now, the rest of us were paying for the mercy fuck he never received. Rat. Funny thing was, if he’d lowered he’d have calmed down for a minute or ten, he might have discovered real friendship in the very misfits he sought to destroy.

For similar reasons, I resented other club ‘rainbow’ promoters who used the same kind spin to crown themselves the new Kings and Queens of nightlife. Too many folks like my friend Haoui, who knew the real score, were gone. Because of AIDS, the credit for almost everything noteworthy on the downtown scene since Studio 54 was up for grabs ― and the bottom-feeders began grabbing like Rudolf, who grabbed the credit for the drop in crime. ‘He cleaned up New York…’ said the news media and salesmen from Kansas City. Bullshit. Crime dropped everywhere because Clinton had balanced the budget and people had jobs to go to. My take on all this: Giuliani cleaned up for his pals, petty club promoters pocketed the proceeds of mediocre nightlife, and the whole fucking thing gave me a migraine.

So what’s a boy to do? Go out, booze, get laid, recover. Repeat. Until he somehow fights a hole in the side of his paper bag. And aside from any criticism that the politically-correct naysayers could hurl, at least me and mine were at the pinnacle of our game. Collectively we were prettier, smarter, uglier, hornier, and more glamorous than any other group in the whole tired, rotten city. We didn’t need to lip synch – we could sing. We didn’t need to search for stars, they came to SqueezeBox! on their own – through the same door as everyone else. Simply by existing ― boys in bikinis dancing next to the Steven Spielbergs of the world; trannies with new chests dancing with the naked Drew Barrymores of the world; homeless kids chatting over martinis with the Sandra Bernhards of the world; East Village drag queens like Misstress Formika, Lily of the Valley and Sherry Vine were singing duets with the Deborah Harrys and Marc Almonds of the world; Michael Schmidt was creating fashion with the JFK Jrs of the world ― for a brief moment on the grand scale of life, we were the world – and many would go on to put a chink in the bourgeoisie armor well into the 21st Century.

Me? I’d managed to climb from the foothills of North Carolina upstage to the hottest NYC scene since Max’s Kansas City. In my teen-hood Debbie and folks like Freddie Mercury came through my hi-fi stereo console with stuff like dreamin’ is free and don’t stop me now. And I believed every word. I still do ― but I’ve learned beliefs come with a price. For now, in the familiar words of Sylvester, ‘let’s party a little bit…’